Field of the Disclosure
This disclosure relates generally to debugging facilities for an information processing system and, more specifically, to debug trace messaging.
Description of the Related Art
New software may be developed using software development tools. Such tools can include an external debugger connected to a data processor, via a debug interface of the processor, to determine instructions executed by the data processor, and to present a representation of the executed instructions to a user. The execution of instructions at the data processor is monitored by a debug processing module of the data processor during a debug trace mode. During debug trace mode, the debug processing module can maintain instruction flow history information that is indicative of the executed instructions. Since data processors can execute instructions very quickly, such history information can represent large numbers of executed instructions, therefore, it is desirable to reduce in the amount of history information that is communicated between the debug processing module and the external debugger to reduce bandwidth requirements.
The use of the same reference symbols in different drawings indicates similar or identical items.